Bad Penny

A bad penny always turns up.

— 18th Century Proverb

On assignment for Colliers in November 1942, photographer Robert Capa snapped the crew of the B-17 "Bad Penny" as they gathered before a daylight bombing raid on a U-boat pen in Germany.

Capa recalled the pilot, Captain Jack Bruce, saying, "After this is over, the longest trip I’ll ever take will be from my house to the nearest river, on my bicycle with my fishing gear on my back.”

Bruce would be dead before month's end.

During another raid—only its sixth—on November 28, "Bad Penny" crossed paths with the German ace Toni Hafner, who shot the bomber down. It crashed in the Mediterranean.

The pilot Bruce died, as did his co-pilot Bob Earl, bombardier Chuck Tannehill, navigator Chuck Knop, top turret gunner Hank Hughes, radio operator Len McGriff, ball turret gunner Al Backus, waist gunner Sam Scott, and tail gunner Merle Gilger.

No remains were recovered. The deaths were recorded in Missing Air Crew Report Number 16197.

Capa's photo, scheduled for the cover of Colliers that week, was yanked when the editor realized it revealed more of the B-17 than the Defense Department would approve.

Starving Artist

Creativity is not something we think a person should go “all in” on. Because, odds are, you’ll starve.

― Jeff Goins

Effective today, I'm going on a diet, to rid myself of the "Quarantine 15." 

It's hardly the first time I've fasted, and likely won't be the last. 

So I'm officially―and literally―becoming today a "starving artist."

That's because, in addition to the start of my diet, today marks the launch of my new website: Robert Francis James

If you like the paintings you see, buy one; help keep me from continuing as a starving artist.

The prices are affordable and include framing. 

The best thing you can do during a lockdown is decorate your space. 

And original art makes fine decoration.

Painting "Challah" by Robert Francis James

Surface Notation

An artist is making something exist by observing it.

― William S. Burroughs

The Independent on Sunday once asked John Updike to describe a writer that affected him.

He responded by naming Proust, the writer who opened Updike's eyes to style―to "prose not as the colorless tool of mimesis but as a gaudy agent dynamic in itself, peeling back dead skins of lazy surface notation, going deeper into reality much as science does with its accumulating formulations."

[Note to English teachers: point out how Updike's use of mathematicians' terms ("agent dynamic," "surface notation") bolsters his comparison between observant writing and science.]

Learning to paint has revealed how irresistible "lazy surface notation" can be.

I'm in a continual―losing―battle with my painting teachers, God Bless 'Em, over surrendering to the temptation to describe only the surfaces of objects, and never the atmosphere in which they dwell; what you might call the deeper reality of their "dance in space."

It's a temptation worse than sugary snacks.

The good news? 

Everyone struggles with lazy surface notation.

Paul Gaugin once wrote in his journal, "I made a promise to keep a watch over myself, to remain master of myself, so that I might become a sure observer."

Promise to watch over myself. 

That's about the best I can do.

Painting "Social Distancing" by Robert Francis James

Weeds

Once in a golden hour, I cast to earth a seed.
Up there came a flower, the people said, a weed.

― Alfred Lord Tennyson

My war against the weeds is going slightly worse than Afghanistan.

Ecologists defend weeds as nature’s way of nourishing the soil and protecting it from erosion. But weeds' spiky proflicacy spooks me―nearly as much as bugs do―and so I engage in an endless ground war against them.

A costly and unwinnable war.

I'm also fighting another unwinnable war: the war against critics. 

While I sow the web with words, hoping like Tennyson they'll flower, my critics see only weeds.

It's easy, of course, to trash an act of creation; much harder to attempt one. I take comfort in the thought. I take comfort, too, in the fact that critics have sometimes been splendidly wrong.

Chicago Tribune critic H.L. Mencken called The Great Gatsby―today considered a literary masterpiece and F. Scott Fitzgerald's definitive work―"no more than a glorified anecdote" when the book appeared in 1925. Mencken thought Gatsby was a "clown," and the other characters worthless and boring. Although Fitzgerald's writing is stylish, Mencken conceded, "this story is obviously unimportant."

Nearly 30 million copies of The Great Gatsby have been sold since 1925.

Critics also sneered at these novels when they first appeared: As I  Lay Dying, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Tropic of Cancer, Lolita, The Handmaid's Tale, To Kill a Mockingbird, On the Road, Slaughterhouse-Five and The Catcher in the Rye.

“I've been all over the world," Leonard Bernstein said, "and I've never seen a statue of a critic.” Nor have I.

Now, back to the weeds.

The Peril of Positive Thinking

Disease is an impudent opinion.

— Phineas Quimby 

Superspreader-in-chief Donald Trump can't take all the heat for the 4.5 million coronavirus cases in the US. He shares the blame with Phineas Quimby.

Quimby was a New England watch-repairman who in the Gilded Age spread the gospel of "New Thought" (also known as "Christian Science").

Told by a country doctor he had incurable TB, Quimby decided "doctors sow the seed of disease, which they nurse 'til it grows to a belief." Determined to heal himself, Quimby set out to study animal magnetism, concluding from his readings that the mind is all-powerful and alone can cure any ill. It can also make you rich.

Quimby's New Thought is still with us; today, we call it "Positive Thinking."

And Trump is Positive Thinking's poobah. 

Like many a wealthy American, he grew up imbibing this swill at the dinner table (Positive Thinking was rich Republicans' rejoinder to FDR's New Deal). He also imbibed Positive Thinking at church: the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, author of the best-selling The Power of Positive Thinking, was the Trump family's pastor. Peale even officiated at Trump's first wedding.

Despite warnings by scientists, Trump continues to call the virus' effects "fake news," flouting facts most intelligent people accept.

He's deep in the grip of Phineas Quimby.